Pages 300-307

It is the range and depth of these scholarly contacts which give the true measure of Aldus' achievement. Printers had traded as widely as he did in [Nicholas] Jenson's time, and there is no doubt that Aldus' rivals, the Giunti, were commercially far more successful. But from the moment in 1496 or 1497 when Codrus Urceus set him in a special category, Aldus has been seen as a man apart by scholars, by writers, and by bibliophiles. Even when his quarrels with Alberto Pio and Aleander were leading him to drown the memory of his Italian friends, Erasmus could not deny that he had longed to have the "Adagia" published "by a celebrated house". Right through the sixteenth century, collectors like the English mathematician and wizard John Dee carefully identified the volumes in their libraries that came from the Aldine press, isolating them from the thousands of others which bore only a date and name of a city.

During the golden years of French classicism, Jean Racine sketched the characters of his own formidable heroines in the margin of an Aldine text of Sophocles' "Electra": and it was only natural that the name of Aldus should have been one of the first to attract eighteenth-century antiquarians like Zeno and Manni, or the collectors of the same and a later period such as Cracherode, Lord Spencer, and Augustin Renouard. From them the current of interest in Aldine studies flows in an unbroken series of studies, bibliographical articles, and laboriously collected documents, down to the present day. The most embittered revisionist -- and I may at time have cast myself in that role -- would find it hard to reduce Aldus' reputation to a skillfully orchestrated programme of self-advertisement. His prestige grew spontaneously, and in his own lifetime: it survived attacks in his own lifetime; it has not only survived, but increased, in the four and a half centuries since his death.

But it has to be admitted that a good deal of recent research makes it hard to find the bed-rock on which that prestige must originally have rested. Even in his simple capacity as a designer of types and a producer of printed books, Aldus' place in the European tradition is far more ambiguous, more narrowly based, and far less closely connected to his own aspirations that this uncritical eulogists have suggested. Amongst illustrated texts "Polifilo" will always count as a masterpiece, and the roman type in which it was printed has been treated by Stanley Morison as a model of visual clarity and a pattern for future typographers. But Aldus did not base his programme on a quest for visual clarity: he never sought copyright on any of his roman types, and he bore no ultimate responsibility for "Polifilo", which was sponsored and financed by the outsider Leonardo Crasso.

Aldus' bid for fame was founded on the Greek and Latin cursives which he publicised widely and protected by no less than six copyrights from the Venetian senate and three successive popes. Admired and imitated in their own time because of their close resemblance to the most fashionable handwritten forms, these types are now either neglected or condemned by scholars and typographers for precisely the same reason: like the script of Apostolis, Musurus, or Tagliente, they are decorative rather than legible. So if Aldus succeeded in setting standards for his own century, then we have to admit that those standards are now discarded: if he supplied a model for the fine roman printing of a later age, then he did so largely by accident. And even in the first years of the sixteenth century, the division of credit between Aldus as designer and Francesco Griffo as caster was a matter for dispute. We cannot hope to settle the question conclusively, but it is significant that Aldus never remodelled his types after Griffo left Venice in 1502.

The reputation for accurate scholarship on which both the printer and many of his assistants staked so much is now severely tarnished, if not wholly defaced. It must be regarded as certain that Aldus never gained direct access to the Greek codices bequeathed to Venice by Cardinal Bessarion. Possibly this was through failure to appreciate their value: more probably it was the result of political confusion and bad luck; whatever the reason, the fact itself removes one of the main supports on which the assumed excellence of Aldine texts has been carried. Detailed examination of individual editions will probably press ahead for some time to come, but it may never be possible to say how far the merits or deficiencies of a particular text should be attributed to Aldus himself, for the system of collective editorship blurred responsibility.

What excites suspicion is the functioning of that system. Aldus sought and adopted corrections from Ricci or Erasmus or Parrhasio in the most haphazard fashion, and with only the most cursory interest in the manuscript-authorities from which they had worked. Most of his exemplars were recent copies borrowed from the libraries of his friends, and he shifted from one to another as if he was composing a scrap-book rather than editing a text. Even in the cases of Petrarch and Pliny, where chance and friendship brought capital manuscripts into his hands, his method of using them appears, on the evidence, to have been arbitrary and subjective. The lucky coincidence of an editor like Musurus with an authority like Bardellone's Hesychius could produce important results. But for most of his career Aldus seems to have followed the modish taste for personal opinion and assumed linguistic expertise rather than the harder and more recently discovered paths of textual and philological analysis. It is doubtful if he, or any of his associates, had progressed as far as their idol Poliziano in understanding the means by which the relationship between different manuscripts can be traced, and the status of the archetype determined. Even the Academy in which Aldus and his friends are supposed to have developed their critical methods, appears, in so far as it ever existed, to have been little more than a short-lived social club.

[COMMENT: This indicates that Aldus used several, perhaps slightly different, manuscripts of the same material to "compile" what he published in his own editions. Whether he did this with Philostratus, we cannot know; but my "guess" is that he didn't. The Philostratus book (even considering such omissions as Palestine, Aristotle and Orpheus) seems very complete. The text flows smoothly. It seems to have been done by the same scribe. Probably the publication of Philostratus was such an easy operation, from only one book source, that Aldus felt no need to give any lengthy preface to it. But we need to see the preface that he wrote, because he called it one of the worst books that he'd ever read.]

As an advocate of mass-enlightenment and social improvement Aldus' position is more secure. If we sneer at his declared ideals, we must devise another explanation for his entering the printing-trade, and his apparent lack of financial reward makes this a difficult task. But we must keep both his ideals and their implementation in careful perspective. Though the number and diffusion of his texts is impressive enough, the notion that he introduced the octavo to bring down book-prices and reach a wider public is quite simply mistaken, and there are more subtle reasons for doubting whether he had any clear vision of what mass-literacy implied. Like his friend Erasmus, Aldus would have paid lip-service to the edifying image of a "virtuous poor", singing the psalms at their work. But he had no more contact than Erasmnus with the realities of popular culture, and he would probably have shared much of Erasmus' contempt for those, like the friars, who did.

For in his background and his social values, Aldus was a courtier. He spent much of his adult life in the polished atmosphere of Carpi and Ferrara: he longed for imperial Vienna even during his most prosperous years in Venice; he chose his correspondents, as far as he could, from the academically useful or politically powerful. Linacre and Reuchlin, Celtis and Thurz, Grolier and Lubranski, were all men who stood close to thrones. He would drop any task, Aldus politely told Elector Frederick's secretary Spalatinus, to reply to a learned friend or a great prince. Provincial schoolmasters like Gerolamo Bologni or needy students like Candidus Romanus do not often seem to have been so lucky. For his own workers Aldus had neither time nor sympathy. His interest in Italian vernacular literature, though genuine and far-sighted, was also strictly bounded by the works which were acceptable in the best company: there is no suggestion that he had any acquaintance with the culture of the piazza or the wine-shop. Perhaps a clerk or artisan occasionally tried to impress his fellows by investing one-and-a-half lire in an Aldine octavo, though he would have had to dig deep into his wages to do so: but he is far more likely to have bought one of the cheap imitations from Brescia or Lyons, more likely still to have preferred the spicy romances or saints' Lives that Francesco da Madiis offered, and most likely of all to have joined the audience of one of the street-singers whom Filippo di Strata so cordially despised. Whatever he may have been intellectually, as a person and a publisher Aldus was not the stuff of which social crusaders are made.

But these very deficiencies -- his élitist attitudes, his frantic experiment, his isolation from the best available sources of material -- must raise Aldus to a far greater eminence as an individual than his misguided admirers have ever done by submerging him in a liberal tradition. It has been implied again and again that the Venetian printing industry carried him along on the tide of its own success and that, consequently, Aldus had only to add a finishing touch. But as we saw at the beginning, the industry was going through an embarrassing period when Aldus arrived in Venice. It lacked constructive direction from above: it was being undermined by savage competition and shoddy workmanship from below. Its range of publications was stagnating, and especially in the field of classical literature, it was in some danger of becoming a forum for the mutual admiration or vituperation of the same group of scholars -- few of whom showed any appreciation of its problems or its potential. Already, there was a sinister nostalgia for the vanished skills of Jenson. The press had in fact lost the sheen of novelty without acquiring the lustre of respectability.

Aldus struck at the heart of this problem by his concentration on the most challenging and prestigious subject of the time -- Greek literature and philosophy. Whether the texts recovered by the Italian humanists of the previous century would have been lost again and irrevocably in the ashes of the Italian Wars if Aldus had not printed them is now, fortunately, a hypothetical question. Personally, I do not believe they would: printers like Callierges and Giunti waited only for the Aldine copyrights to lapse before embarking on their own programmes, the Marciana survived the Venetian senate's indifference and the Vatican library survived the Sack of Rome. But nothing can take from Aldus the credit for his Greek first editions, and he has received far less recognition than he deserves for the pains which they must have cost him.

[COMMENT: Lowry made a very important point here. He states that during the 1400s, texts were "recovered by the Italian humanists", indicating that during the 1400s there was a movement or trend to recover or reassemble some of the "lost" texts from previous centuries. Cardinal Bessarion's library is a perfect example of this. Again here, above, Lowry emphasizes that Aldus didn't have access to Bessarion's collection in Venice. I find that a bit difficult to believe myself, but maybe so.]

To publish successfully in Greek needed not only idealism, but patience and tact in assembling the means necessary to do so: and Aldus' company was a business concern, not a humanist cadre sponsored by Alberto Pio. The gaps in our information about the early 1490s mean that we cannot know what sort of difficulties Aldus had to face in finding capital backing and technical expertise: but the fact that he emerged with the doge's nephew and a highly successful publisher to underwrite his plans, and Francesco Griffo to cast his types, is sufficient proof of his determination. The patience with which Aldus calmed Torresani's fears about the slow sale of Greek texts and eventually made him a convert to his own ideals, must stand as one of the most remarkable achievements of his career. But it has passed completely unnoticed.

While he was selling scholarship to the printers with one hand, with the other Aldus was selling printing to the scholars. This is an aspect of his career which has been more fully investigated, but I think still not fully understood because of a failure to see the gulf which separated the equivocation of Sabellico and the portentous warnings of Filippo di Strata from the excited activity which centered on Aldus' workshop by the later 1490s. His carefully integrated campaign for support seems to date from the moment of his arrival in Venice. First, scholars like Leoniceno and Urceus were cultivated by personal assistance or deferential requests for advice. Next, when the work of publication had begun, they were placated by the appearance of texts which were needed for their own lectures, and whose types bore the closest possible resemblance to the most fashionable hand-written scripts: the wide margins of an expensive manuscript were indeed copied so faithfully that Urceus objected to the waste of paper. Finally, when their interest had been thoroughly and widely aroused, the intellectuals of Italy and Europe were given a sense of collective identity and vocation by the dream of a New Academy. If the reality was unimpressive enough, then we saw in the final chapter how little reality mattered compared to a feeling of participation in the revival of the ancient world.

And at every stage in his career, Aldus encouraged that feeling by his skillful use of dedications and prefaces. They could perform great personal services by putting the name of a comparatively unknown scholar like Daniele Clari before a large audience: at the other end of the social scale they could canvass the support of Matthew Lang or Lucrezia Borgia; and at all levels, they could subtly spread the printer's own ideals through the reading public. I sometimes think it has become too easy to attribute every liberal tendency in early sixteenth-century thought to "Erasmian influences", irrespective of the fact that Erasmus depended entirely on the means by which his ideas were communicated and that those ideas were not, in themselves, particularly original. The improvement of society through education, the printing and study of the Bible in all three ancient languages, the establishment of specialised colleges, were all schemes which Aldus had broadcast throughout Europe in his prefaces when Erasmus was still an almost unknown wanderer in Paris and Oxford.

[COMMENT: Again we read about the importance which Aldus placed on his dedications and prefaces. Again, we must see what he put at the beginning of his edition of Philostratus.

It is certainly clear that Aldus gained an emotional hold over the scholars of his time which his predecessors had never tried to establish and which his successors, in a more difficult age, were unable to reproduce. His gift for friendship was remarkable. Only very occasionally do we hear a jarring note: when Apostolis is forced to return ten ducats which he feels he has earned honestly, or when Griffo complains that the credit for Aldus' famous types is due to him. Both these men appear to have been prickly characters, and both may have suffered from the printer's snobbish assumption that they were social inferiors whose goodwill and services were equally dispensable. For the most part, we find Aldus cultivating the sympathy even of sworn rivals: in an age of vicious academic backbiting, his name is surrounded by an aura of astonishing calm. And through men like Reuchlin or Linacre, he could speak indirectly to the leading intellectual cadres of northern European countries and make friends whom he never even met. Certainly the use of the Marciana would have given better results than an unremitting but uncritical quest for material across the face of a continent: but if Aldus had been able to rely on a single source for his most important publications, his whole system of contacts and all the exchange of information that it involved might have remained unexplored and unnecessary.

Of his contribution to the social acceptance of the printed book many of the same points could be made. Aldus did not reduce book prices, at least not uniformly, and it is highly improbable that he was reaching towards a mass-market. What he did achieve was to raise the prestige of the mass-produced book by convincing a more exclusive market that it was reputable. Modish prejudices against ink-stained barbarians and the ready services of men like Vespasiano de'Bisticci left the aristocratic patrons of the fifteenth-century little affected by the arrival of print. Aldus changed this decisively. His own impeccable connections helped him to cut through the existing attitudes, and quickly gain the support of intellectual noblemen in Venice. Through them, he was soon accepted in the polished groups of contemporary Padua, and from Padua, it was only a short step to the intellectual and social élites of Italy and Europe. Excluding those to whom he dedicated editions in which they might or might not be interested, Aldus' personal correspondents included the Emperor Maximilian, the Elector of Saxony, Prince Cesare of Naples, the duke of Atri, the marquis of Mantua and his still more illustrious wife, Isabella d'Este, besides bishops, ambassadors, and royal councillors beyond counting. Illuminated copies offered a special bait to the aristocratic buyer, and we have only to glance at the libraries of Grolier or Pirckheimer to see how readily such people were tempted. This campaign for noble recognition played a crucial part in raising the status of the printed book towards that of the manuscript, which it was now ready to replace.

But as the manuscript disappeared, a great part of Aldus' world disappeared with it, and it is this very fact which has left him such a shadowy figure. Though he was, unquestionably, a powerful individual and a man of both vision and determination, more than half his life is almost completely unknown and even his letters were collected only by friends anxious to preserve his fast-fading memory. Much of his importance lies in the short, hectic period of his printing career: he spoke to the intellectual élite of Europe during the last two decades when it was possible for any one man to address a group bent on restoring a common tradition, and largely agreed on the most important features of that tradition. Within a few years of his death, Aldus' friends in Wittenberg had more to occupy their minds than the latest Greek texts. A few years more, and the linguistic traditions themselves were shifting as the vernacular and national literatures rose to challenge the dominance of cosmopolitan Latin and Greek. Aldus' own dreams of a world filled with good books had played some part in this process of fragmentation: his work meant that soon, scholars had no longer to look to the rich libraries of Italy for an intellectual lead, and that the future of scholarship itself lay with the individual in his study amongst his grammar-books and critical editions. The dedicated groups gathered round the manuscripts in those unforgettable exchanges of information and ideals, were now a thing of the past. They had been only an exhilarating incident in the grand process of transition. If Aldus died a melancholy man, it was not altogether without reason: for he had played a great part in destroying the world that had created him, and he could not yet foresee the veneration in which he would be held by the new world that he was calling into being.

THE END

Nicolas, I have looked back through the book about Aldus, and here are a few items that I neglected to include the first time around.

THE WORLD OF ALDUS MANUTIUS
By Martin Lowry, Cornell University Press, 1979.

The following is the beginning of Chapter One, "Men of Business and Men of Letters".

Pages 7-8 -- On 18 September 1469 a German resident named John of Speyer was granted a five-year monopoly over the craft of printing, which he had recently pioneered in the Republic of Venice. Petitions of the sort which John had presented were very common: they punctuate the records of all the main bodies in the Venetian state, cover every subject from improved windmills to experiments with poison-gas, and were normally treated with the same polite and sympathetic encouragement which John received. Few came to anything. In this case, the thirty or so members of the College who voted on the privilege must have had much else on their minds: war with the newly established Ottoman power in the Aegean; the manoeuvring of their Italian neighbours, who regarded Venice with profound suspicion after her rapid expansion onto the mainland during the first half of the fifteenth century; above all, the preservation of the lucrative Eastern trade which Venice had effectively monopolised since her defeat of Genoa in 1381 and which by now had made her the most prosperous and most envied commercial centre in Europe.

John's petition can hardly have been more than a small item of extra business, and there was little to show that, within a few years, the craft which he represented would transform the life of the city more radically than the Sultan would ever do. John himself died within a few months of gaining the monopoly. His work was continued by his brother Windelin, but the privilege died with the original holder and competitors were soon thrusting themselves forward. The disgruntled scribe who complained in 1473 or 1474 that the city was "stuffed with books" appears to have been perfectly right. Since the beginning of the decade 176 different editions had been published: by the end of the same decade the figure would be 593; by the end of the century roughly 150 Venetian presses had turned out over 4,000 editions, representing nearly twice the known production of the city's nearest rival, Paris, between a seventh and an eighth of the total output of Europe's presses during the period, and, at a very rough guess, twenty books to each individual member of the Venetian population.

Not surprisingly, two of the largest-known and fastest-growing private libraries of the age belonged to Venetian citizens, the diarist Marin Sanudo and Cardinal Domenico Grimani. [There is a footnote to this sentence: Sanudo's library grew from around 500 volumes in 1502 to 6,500 by the 1530s. ... Grimani's library numbered 15,000 volumes in 1523.]

[COMMENT: Since Marin Sanudo was one of Aldus' partners and received five dedications in the early Aldine editions of 1501-1504, then again, as I have stated before, Marin Sanudo is a prime candidate to have supplied Aldus with the books by Philostratus. Cardinal Grimani was the uncle of Marin Sanudo, so Grimani also cannot be ruled out as a source of manuscripts. With these two large libraries to consult, perhaps Aldus felt that there was no need for him to use the Marciana Library donated to Venice by Cardinal Bessarion.]

The look of the city itself was affected, for the printers rapidly took over the parishes of San Zulian and San Paternian as their particular quarter, and by the early 1490s rank upon rank of bookstalls tempted the passer-by as he walked from the Rialto down the Merceria towards San Marco. Venice may not have been even the first city in Italy to establish a printing industry: but the amazing expansion of that industry, once established, leaves no doubt that Venice was the first city in the world to feel the full impact of printing, and to experience the most important revolution in human communications between the development of letter-symbols some time in the fourth millennium before Christ and the emergence of electronic mass-media in our own age. Any study of the intellectual, social or economic life of Venice during the later fifteenth century must take account of this fact, and do something to explain it. Why, and how, did the press expand so rapidly? How did established intellectual circles react? How was society affected?

The lure of imagined wealth, and the apparent ease of achieving it will do much to explain the activity of the press in Venice, where the glitter of gold was more inviting than anywhere in fifteenth-century Europe. First, everyone was convinced that printers were rich. "Richissimo," wrote Sanudo of Nicholas Jenson, the most celebrated publisher in Venice during the 1470s. Erasmus credited Andrea Torresani with 1,000 ducats net profit each year, and an overall fortune of 100,000. As late as the 1530s a Basel printer, Thomas Platter, stated his motives with a disarming naïveté which must have been anticipated many times in less experienced age: "But when I saw how Hervagius and the other printers had a good business, and with little work made a good profit, I thought, 'I should like to become a printer'."

Chapter Two, "The Wandering Scholar"

Pages 48-49 -- How far is it possible to trace the currents within this maelstrom of interests and opinions which led Aldus Manutius to become the scholar who turned printer? The question is as important as it is puzzling: Aldus made his crucial decision when he was forty, and comfortably established in the career of a professional teacher, so we must explain first why the decision was made at all. But we have virtually no information about these forty years. Even the biographer's usual stepping stones, a date of birth and the influence of a family, are denied to us, for Aldus' son and grandson disagreed over the year of his birth and we know nothing of his family except the names of three sisters for whom he assumed responsibility. We can only approach the first half of Aldus' life by fitting the few established facts as closely as possible into a cultural framework. And the facts give us at least one promising line of investigation: Aldus must have been aware of printing from almost the first moment of its arrival in Italy.

He was born at Bassiano, near Rome, a year or so on either side of 1450, and his early education was naturally acquired in Rome. We learn this from two very oblique references in his later dedications: the first, in the Theocritus of 1495, recalls the Latin lessons of Gaspare da Verona; the second, in the Statius of 1502, mentions a lecture of Domizio Calderini which the writer had heard "at Rome when I was a boy".

[Footnote: Aldus' son Paulus put the date in 1452 by saying that his father died "in his sixty-third year" (1515). The younger Aldus pushed the date back to 1449 by referring to 1597 as "the hundred and forty-seventh year after the birth of my grandfather". ... Aldus made provision for three sisters named Julia, Petrucia and Benevenuta, in his first two, but not in his last will.]

[COMMENT: The first paragraph of what follows on pages 51-52, I've already sent; however, there is a footnote that I neglected to include, so I am adding some previous text here. The paragraphs beginning "In the same, vital dedication" are new.]

Pages 51-52 -- When he [Aldus] arrived in Venice around 1490, one of those best placed to assist him was Marcantonio Sabellico, whose experience of the publishing world has been discussed in the previous chapter and who, as librarian of the Marciana, was in charge of the richest collection of Greek manuscripts in the Western world. He was a fellow-Roman, and a pupil of both Gaspare da Verona and Calderini. A connection would have been obvious, and highly advantageous. But the only evidence we have that contact was made lies in the request of another scholar to Aldus, who is asked to pay respects to Sabellico. Rather than cultivating his influential senior, Aldus made a life-long friend of his main rival Giambattista Egnazio, who in his "Racemationes" of 1502 sharply attacked Sabellico's scholarship, and his attempts to undermine Egnazio's own popularity. We can only speculate about the reasons for Aldus' apparent hostility to the Roman school. A SINCERELY PIOUS CHRISTIAN, HE MAY HAVE BEEN DISTURBED BY THE MORE BIZARRE ANTIQUARIAN POSTURING OF POMPONIO LETO AND HIS CIRCLE, AND BY THE SUSPICIONS OF PAGANISM OR CONSPIRACY WHICH HAD FASTENED ONTO THEM IN 1468. But this could hardly have affected his feelings about Garpare or de Bussi. Whatever the reasons, it is clearly most unsafe to attach any decisive importance to Aldus' period of study in Rome.

[Footnote following 1468: On the activities of what has been called a "heathen and republican secret society", see L. von Pastor, "History of the Popes", Vol. IV, London, 1923, pp. 37-79. Thought never censorious, Aldus was clearly suspicious of poets such as Lucretius.]

In the same, vital dedication of his edition of Theocritus to Battista Guarino, Aldus shows that he had studied Greek under that distinguished teacher in Ferrara. The exact dates are again uncertain, and they were very probably discontinuous. To have heard Calderii's higher flights of imagination, Aldus must still have been in Rome around the mid-1470s: while a document from the archives of Carpi, dated 8 March 1480, grants him citizenship of that town, naming him tutor to the princes Alberto and Lionello Pio and a resident for some time. Obviously, Aldus studied in Ferrara during the later 1470s. But in a letter of 1485, he states explicitly that he left Ferrara only in 1482, and much later he claims to have taught there himself. ... Exactly how or when Aldus secured his post at Carpi is not clear: it seems most likely that he was recommended by the famous uncle of the two princes, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who was also studying in Ferrara during this period.

A sober and gentle character, approaching the age of thirty and with a good background of Latin scholarship, Aldus must have been an obvious choice. He probably passed frequently between Ferrara and Carpi not only during the 1470s but again after 1484, when peace between Venice and the Estensi made conditions possible again and Alberto Pio went to study at Ferrara in his own right. The scattered references show that Aldus was now fully launched on the career of a professional man of letters, clinging to the fringe of the academic world and taking the opportunities that came his way.

Footnote on Page 176: Torresani was born on 4 March 1451 which certainly makes him younger than Aldus whether the latter was born in 1447 or 1450. [Aldus' marriage into the Torresani family was dated] on unknown grounds to 1499, but a letter to Aldus from Alberto Pio, dated 11 March 1505, mentions that it had taken place "during this Carnival".

Footnote on Page 177: A.F. Johnson, "Books Printed at Lyons in the Sixteenth Century", "The Library", Fourth Series, III, 1922.

[COMMENT: We should perhaps try to get a copy of the above article on these books printed at Lyons. This totally concludes my work with the Aldus book, and I'm returning it to the library on Monday. Rob]